Lenny Henry told the select committee that the BBC was suffering from 'initiative fatigue' and that people had lost hope. Photograph: PA Wire

The actor and comedian Lenny Henry has said that Britain has been haemorhaging ethnic minority talent to the US, and has expressed doubts that a BBC plan to improve representation of black and Asian people on air will prove effective.

Henry told MPs on the culture, media and sport select committee that Britain had been losing talent because of the mistaken belief that ethnic minority actors did not have star power.

British actors including Archie Panjabi, who stars in The Good Wife, Idris Elba, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Marianne Jean-Baptiste, and fellow Bend it Like Beckham star Parminder Nagra, who had a leading role in ER, have all had success in the US.

But Henry told MPs: “Chiwetel Ejiofor and Idris Elba didn’t need more training, they just needed a break.”

Elba shot to fame in the American show The Wire, before starring in Luther, and the movie Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom. Ejiofor recently won acclaim for his role in the film 12 Years A Slave.

Henry added: “Development [funding] is great but there are people absolutely trained and ready to rock. It’s odd. The inference seems to be ‘oh you’re not ready yet ... here’s a little bit of development money, go away and practise a bit more until you’re ready’.”

He said of Lord Hall’s plans: “It has the greatest of intentions but with massive respect it is based on an old model that hasn’t worked. Increased training and increased development funds do not deliver change ... but jobs do.”

Henry, who shot to fame when he won in the talent show New Faces, in 1975, added: “Idris Elba did not need more training to be a great actor, he just needed a break. Back in the day when I entered New Faces ... I just needed a break.”

“There is initiative fatigue. People have lost hope and don’t believe that yet one more initiative will achieve true diversity.

“At the BBC alone in the last 15 years there have been 29 initiatives to achieve ethnic diversity, and the numbers are actually going down. Things are being done but they’re not really working.”

Henry said he wanted to see money ringfenced specifically for ethnic minority productions, a move the BBC had previously made to increase the amount of network programming commissioned from Scotland, Wales, Nothern Ireland and the English regions outside London.

He said: “This is not about tokenism, about black people working on black programmes and Chinese people making a documentary about Chinese New Year every now and again. This is about driving up quality.”

The comedian said that any show, from the Doctor Who series to Question Time, could meet his criteria, which includes boosting numbers on-screen, as well as production staff, from ethnic minorities. His his model could “apply to all the broadcasters” he said.

He said: “We are haemorrhaging talent in this country. There was this idea floating around that [black and ethnic minority actors] don’t have enough star power to drive a feature film or a long-running TV series.

“People like Idris Elba, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Archie Panjabi and Chiwetel Ejiofor have disproven this. They’re from here. They could be benefiting us here. This is all about benefiting our country and representing us as a global force.”

Patrick Younge, the former chief creative officer of BBC Television Production, said of the BBC’s £2.1m plans: “It’s a well intentioned move. But it’s addressing the wrong part of the problem.”

He added that “more [black and ethnic minority staff] left the BBC than joined [while he was running production], they went backwards”.

He said: “£2.1m, it’s tiny. It’s three episodes of Luther in terms of on-air spend.”

Younge admitted: “The first Asian family we introduced into EastEnders were, I think, Goan Christians. You have to go some in the East End to have Goan Christians as the first Asian family. Every Asian in Britain knew that, when it came to authenticity, the BBC missed the mark.

“Somebody said about [the show] Luther ‘great series but why did he have no black friends?’ These are the real questions that people start asking.”

A BBC spokesperson defended the diversity plans: “Last week we set out far-reaching plans that we believe will make a tangible difference – we will work hard to deliver them and, of course, reserve the option of going further if we fall short, but people should judge us on progress over the coming months and years before concluding the need for even more measures.”